Just as Do the Right Thing was the capstone of Spike Lee’s earlier career, Malcolm X marked the next milestone in the filmmaker’s artistic maturity. It seemed everything Lee had done up to that point was to prepare him for this epic biography of America’s fiery civil-rights leader, who is superbly played by Oscar-nominated Denzel [...]

SULLIVANS ISLAND, S.C. — The role of black Civil War troops in gaining the freedom of black Americans was pushed to a distant corner of the national memory for decades. But the little-known story of the more than 200,000 blacks who served in the Union forces is one that scattered groups of black re-enactors are [...]